D&D 5E XP Multiplier

Saelorn said:

The game tells you what the rules are.

Click to expand...

You're right, it does. Here's p. 260 of the DMG: "Typically, adventurers earn experience only for encounters they participate in. If a player is absent for a session, the player's character misses out on the experience points."

But then, later in the same section: "As an alternative, give absent characters the same XP that the other characters earned each session, keeping the group at the same level."

The game supports both approaches, and could hardly be more explicit in doing so. If you're going to invoke the rules, for Pete's sake at least get them right.

Saelorn said:

What happens when you break the rules is not a matter that they address, because there's no reason to expect that you would follow that rule when you've already shown your disregard for the rules.

Click to expand...

You're so close here to the fundamental realization that rules only exist when they are enforced.

Quickleaf said:

I can think of a couple reasons why the RAW assumes you don't account for the XP multiplier when awarding XP:

• Area effect spells can wipe the floor with lower CR monsters, especially things like goblins and orcs. The higher level PCs gets, the more they have resources to lay waste to groups of minions. So...just because you have 20 kobolds instead of 5, it may not actually be any more significantly challenging to a party packing a fireball.

Click to expand...

That seems to imply that the multiplier should not be used for calculating the difficulty of the encounter either.

• D&D 5e is designed to encourage creative solutions to the challenge posed by monsters. It's intentional that, when confronted with a large group of monsters, "kill them all" may not be the best approach.

Click to expand...

In order for this to be relevant, I guess you have to be assuming that numbers affect difficulty for combat, but not for other interactions? Assuming that it is, fundamentally, an adversarial interaction, and since this is all very rough approximation anyway, combat difficulty seems like a reasonable stand-in even if things are resolved without physical violence. It represents the general threat that the adversary poses.

Saelorn said:

Fewer games codify penalties for when the GM cheats, but of the one I can recall right now, a player who successfully calls a GM out for cheating results in the entire adventure being discarded and the player characters being reset back to the state they were in before that adventure started.

Click to expand...

At that point, I have a hard time envisioning there will be any further sessions with that GM and those players. Not to mention that this might be more of a penalty for the players than the GM. Not to mention that it is not always easy to define when the 'current adventure' began. Not to mention you need an objective, agreed upon definition of GM cheating.

Shiroiken said:

Using the multiplier would also force DMs to use the Encounter Guidelines. In my previous campaign, I generally ignored them, only calculating after the fact for curiosity sake. Often the encounter would be well past "Deadly," even without the multiplier, yet my party did very well against most things (dragons were much harder than their CR guideline would indicate). If I had to include the multiplier, I would have to do the guideline for every single encounter, which would suck.

Click to expand...

?
Are you saying that you think the encounter XP calculation is difficult or time-consuming? If you have custom creatures for which you need to do the basic CR calculation, yeah, that may take a few minutes, but if you already have the CRs for each creature, I can't think of any reason that the encounter XP calculation would take more than a minute. Am I missing something?

Harzel said:

That seems to imply that the multiplier should not be used for calculating the difficulty of the encounter either.


In order for this to be relevant, I guess you have to be assuming that numbers affect difficulty for combat, but not for other interactions? Assuming that it is, fundamentally, an adversarial interaction, and since this is all very rough approximation anyway, combat difficulty seems like a reasonable stand-in even if things are resolved without physical violence. It represents the general threat that the adversary poses.

Click to expand...

Absolutely, it depends.

For a group without area effects, particularly a group below 5th level, yeah the XP multiplier guidelines in the DMG make sense: A fight with more monsters is more challenging, but also something you want to avoid if possible.

For a group of skilled players swimming in area effects, particularly a group above 5th level, the XP multiplier guidelines in the DMG may not make sense.

Part of the art of DMing is figuring out the sweet spot for one's group. I've noticed myself doing a lot of impromptu "gauging the wind speed with my thumb" to determine how difficult an encounter might be. Here's a recent example...

In my Al-Qadim game, I ran a homebrew seven-headed Pyrohydra (CR 13) against a party of six 11th level PCs. It would be a "medium" difficulty encounter for a party of five PCs, but for six PCs it was just an "easy" encounter. The PCs had a bunch of NPC support, however none of that came into play because the pyrohydra surprised the PCs and their allies (who had low initiative scores). In fact, two of the PCs were surprised as well, and all the PCs' allies did was soak up a few attacks and put their pack animals at risk. And the pyrohydra was fighting from the water, and I gave it some spontaneous abilities like a reactive tail slap & the ability to use its fire breath to make the oasis pond it lurked in begin to boil.

Overall, the outcome matched my expectation: an "easy" encounter, which I intended to set the scene, get the party asking questions, and give them a long overdue fight. However, my small tweaks made it more interesting than a "throwaway" or "boring" easy encounter.

Personally, I found using the hydra to be a good litmus test for a party's capabilities when it comes to multi-attacking (rather than area effect attacks, which are pretty obvious). It has a lot of attacks, simulating an encounter with a # of monsters = to its # of heads, but it goes down faster.

Harzel said:

At that point, I have a hard time envisioning there will be any further sessions with that GM and those players. Not to mention that this might be more of a penalty for the players than the GM. Not to mention that it is not always easy to define when the 'current adventure' began. Not to mention you need an objective, agreed upon definition of GM cheating.

Click to expand...

The game in question actually does have a fairly extensive list of what counts as cheating. And I agree, if you waste too much of everyone's time, then it's unlikely that you'll be invited back; that's pretty standard when it comes to cheating, though.

TheCosmicKid said:

The game supports both approaches, and could hardly be more explicit in doing so. If you're going to invoke the rules, for Pete's sake at least get them right.

Click to expand...

The rules also state that meta-gaming is bad, so supporting both approaches is just a detour into inconsistency. It's hardly the only place where they make that type of error.

Tobold said:

In a different thread two people wanted to "correct" a calculation of awarded xp of mine, by pointing out the xp multiplier from the table in the DMG on page 82. Then others chimed in, pointing out that those multipliers were only for calculating encounter difficulty, not for awarding xp. That evoked two questions in me:

1. How many people are using that multiplier for awarded xp?
2. And wouldn't that actually be the better way?

If we say that 6 goblins in a pack are twice as difficult than 6 single goblins in a row, wouldn't it be only logical to give more xp for the harder encounter?

Click to expand...

When I started converting to 5e, I thought it would be more reasonable to include the multiplier in awarded XP. Then, as someone else mentioned, that seemed like too much XP, so I dropped it. Reading this thread has made me rethink that though, and I'm thinking now that if that seems like too much, I should keep the multiplier, but scale back all creature-encounter XP uniformly.

In any case, while I didn't want to drop creature-encounter XP completely, I did want to move toward making it more like 1/2 of total XP awarded by also giving XP for exploration and goal completion (whether the goal originates with me via a plot hook, or from the PCs themselves). But all this makes me realize that I have probably been lax in rewarding social encounter based accomplishments. Thank you for making me think about it.

Saelorn said:

The rules also state that meta-gaming is bad, so supporting both approaches is just a detour into inconsistency. It's hardly the only place where they make that type of error.

Click to expand...

You have a very idiosyncratic definition of "metagaming" which does not appear to match the definition used by the rules any more than it matches the definition used by most other players. There is no textual indication whatsoever that the handling of XP for absent players, one way or the other, constitutes "metagaming" as discouraged on DMG p. 235. The inconsistency you perceive comes from assumptions you are making, not the game.

But let's say for the sake of argument that the rules are inconsistent. Logically, if there is an inconsistency, either of the two premises contributing to the inconsistency may be discarded. Quite simply, it does not follow for you to insist that we discard the XP-awarding rule because it contradicts the metagame rule. It is absolutely just as logical to discard the metagame rule because it contradicts the XP-awarding rule instead.

And, stepping back a moment, doesn't it seem a bit silly for you to look down your nose at people who "disregard" a ruleset which by your own admission is inconsistent? In an inconsistent ruleset, everybody, including you, has to disregard something.

TheCosmicKid said:

But let's say for the sake of argument that the rules are inconsistent. Logically, if there is an inconsistency, either of the two premises contributing to the inconsistency may be discarded. Quite simply, it does not follow for you to insist that we discard the XP-awarding rule because it contradicts the metagame rule. It is absolutely just as logical to discard the metagame rule because it contradicts the XP-awarding rule instead.

Click to expand...

That would only be the case if you care about consistency as the highest priority. If this is to be played as an RPG, then the rule against meta-gaming must be given equal priority, because meta-gaming is definitionally the antithesis of role-playing. While you could have a decently consistent game by just accepting the meta-game component, it would no longer be a role-playing game, and there would be no point in playing it (from a role-playing perspective).

TheCosmicKid said:

And, stepping back a moment, doesn't it seem a bit silly for you to look down your nose at people who "disregard" a ruleset which by your own admission is inconsistent? In an inconsistent ruleset, everybody, including you, has to disregard something.

Click to expand...

No game is perfect, least of all this one. At best, this game can be salvaged by carefully choosing which inconsistencies to ignore.

I will absolutely look down at anyone who claims to support role-playing while also espousing the merits of meta-gaming, as those trolls are a plague on the entire hobby, and rightly deserve to be shunned.

That goes back to a previous point, about wasting everyone's time. If you show up at my table and proceed to waste my time, and the time of everyone else in the group, then you will be asked to leave. It is simply disrespectful. This is a group activity, and everyone has an obligation to respect the game and the other players if they want to participate.